In any business, keeping customers satisfied is critical. Many techniques have been used to determine the level of customer satisfaction. One technique provides for analyzing sales histories and related product matrices. However, only limited information is typically gathered from sales histories. For example, while analyzing sales history for a particular product or group of products may provide information about which products are beginning to weaken in sales, little if any information is provided about why particular products are slowing in sales. Furthermore, although sales history may provide information about regional buying trends, it usually cannot indicate why a particular customer was dissatisfied.
Getting customer response through the use of generic surveys has several disadvantages. First, surveys tend to be impersonal and ask general questions such as “How was your meal?” or “Would you shop here again?” that are not unique to a particular customer's experience. Second, surveys are often unnecessarily cumbersome to complete. For example, a survey may ask for the product name, identifier (survey token), serial number, store purchased from, purchase price, purchase date, and a host of other questions unrelated to a particular customer's feedback. While the answers to these questions may be important to determine which product or service the customer is commenting on, a customer looking over this type of survey often determines that too much work must be done that is unrelated to their particular transaction and foregoes answering any of the questions in the survey.
Many merchants, such as retail establishments, restaurants and other service providers, use modem Point-of-Sale (POS) systems that capture rich details around their customers' purchasing activity. This information, herein referred to as a customer-check, receipt, bill or simply check, however, has never been made available for the customer to interact with in terms of survey and satisfaction. With most POS systems, check-level data can include: the server or cashier, the date and time of service, the check duration, the table, the location, the mode, and each item ordered on the check plus modifications, comps, etc. applied to the check—this is rich data to the customer. Other systems provide customer satisfaction surveys but they ask only a pre-determined set of questions and rarely (if ever) provide actual feedback on the customers' specific experience. To get check-level survey information many businesses hire “Secret Shoppers” (secret only in that the merchant does not know they are professional consumer/survey takers) to provide feedback on service, product purchases, and experience.
What is needed is a system that allows customers to provide valuable feedback for merchants not only through pre-set survey campaigns or template(s), but also in obtaining detailed feedback on the customer's specific experience such as the actual items sold, the transaction amounts (i.e., price), the server (i.e., waitress or waiter), the table, the time of day, the mode of service delivery (i.e., sitting down at a table, drive through, delivery), and more.